The Quicksand.
Let's be honest: if they had been Italian and opted for such a name, we would have hunted them down with dogs.
But they are Americans and so the moniker, since we don't understand a thing, ends up being cool regardless, a bit like Auanagana Beibe Camon.
If they had been Italian and debuted (or even not: around here there isn't the habit of giving space to those who have something interesting to say, especially not in music) in 1993 with one of the simply most intelligent and beautiful albums of those combative years, we wouldn't even have noticed and they would have dissolved after three concerts in some damp and seedy dive.
But they are Americans and there, perhaps due to the high average per capita GDP, bands are not only debuting but also playing, supporting and releasing them at the speed of light. Then that they allow it with nonchalance to pigs and dogs of every race and species is a whole other story.
I think I'm digressing.
Let's get back to Quicksand.
After recording only two LPs at the beginning of the last decade of the last millennium, they suddenly went underground, losing their tracks, and diminishing the hopes over the years of seeing and hearing them play together again.
In late 2017, just 22 years from their last record cry, here they are together again. Who would have ever thought.
The meaning of such an album, considering the characteristics that compose it, might require a multi-dimensional analysis:
a band that in those years was born as a "reaction", perhaps even evolution of the previous hardcore matrix of the members who were part of it and that today essentially resume the discourse exactly where it stopped. Almost crystallized.
I don't know whether it's a lack of ability to imagine beyond or a precise desire to retrace the same steps, but the fact is that the album is really quite successful.
It's not unlikely I say so since "Slip" was qualitatively really a watershed and having had the chance to appreciate it live, I can't imagine a different sound from them.
Maybe to a teenager who today also looks with curiosity at today's musical world, necessarily living in their times, such work will presumably say little or nothing: musical vintage or a little more.
I fear I'm digressing again.
So let's delve into the interiors of this "Interiors", expelled last November from Mr. Brett Gurewitz's Epitaph: the opening track, "Illuminant", immediately enlightens us on how full and clear the overall sound will be: the rhythmic intersections of bass and drums are precise, surgical, undulating, and tumultuous; Tom Capone's guitar is a silent, undercover probe that when it rises screams pain throughout the album.
And then there's Walter Schreifels’ singing: polite, suffered, empathetic. I would dare to say perfect for the context.
In the lot, there's some (moderately) more agitated track than the others: "Under The Screw" and "Sick Mind" are the "noisiest" peaks of an album that has that indefinite flavor which I personally love and which I would define overall as "robustly reflective", whatever that may mean.
Often you almost have the sensation that they go nowhere and instead, listening carefully, they simply tell us that they are here and now.
And it is, ultimately, the only thing that matters.
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